


The Worlds You Erase

by safe_haven



Series: I Knew You'd Fight (Until the War was Won) [1]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Past, Self-Harm, Sensory Overload, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, hamilton does not do heroin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:54:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29708478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/safe_haven/pseuds/safe_haven
Summary: Enemies to "Alexander Hamilton I Know You Are Not Doing Heroin"(Alexandar Hamilton is Not doing heroin)(Alexandar Hamilton has a whole lot of emotions. Sometimes he can't handle all of them. Sometimes he needs help) (Enter Thomas Jefferson) (The author says in parenthesis)
Relationships: Alexander Hamilton & Gilbert du Motier Marquis de Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton/Thomas Jefferson
Series: I Knew You'd Fight (Until the War was Won) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2183529
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	The Worlds You Erase

**Author's Note:**

> TW // self-harm, mention of past suicide attempts, brief mention of seizures

There is something about every possible event that could conceivably happen that sends Alexander Hamilton spiraling.

His heart, after all, is far too big for his body.

His heart fills his chest and comes spilling out of his mouth. He hyperfixates, obsesses, loves, hates with the same intensity every time. Sometimes he’s not sure whether his body can take it anymore.

He is worn out.

Having emotions is draining. It also hurts, a lot.

Alexander is sitting at an empty lunch table, attempting to stifle the excitement over another unit for his molecular biology class. His body cannot handle any more excitement.

(He still has bruises from his Newsies phase.)

(Alexander is a sucker for revolution.)

No one else knows, of course, about this strange habit of his. It’s less of a habit, really, because he doesn’t think there’s anything he can do to change it.

So, when Jefferson strides up to his from across the campus grounds, tapping on the space in front of him, he swallows his passion and sets the papers to the side. His fingers are itching to get to it.

“Hello, Jefferson,” he deadpans.

“Hamilton.”

“What do you want.”

“For you to stop being a bitch.”

Hamilton glared at Jefferson. His shoulders tensed. Energy built up in his arms and hands, and he wanted desperately to swing.

“What. Do you. Want.”

Jefferson put his hands up in a fake show of surrender. “I just wanted to let you know we’ve been assigned to be partners on another essay. Orders from Washington.”

Alexander rolled his eyes, letting out a sharp breath. It was far from the first time they had been assigned an essay together; they were the best students at this school, but Jefferson’s voice was becoming grating.

The lights were too bright.

And since when has his jacket been touching his arms?

“Okay. Go away.”

“Are we even going to di-”

“Go away.”

Alexander does his best to keep his voice from shaking. He no longer wants to work on anything at all. He wants to curl up and sleep.

“Touchy,” Jefferson mumbled, but he complied, bowing out of Alexander’s space and stalking away.

Sometimes Alex gave himself whiplash from how quickly his emotions changed. How quickly he shoots from an extreme high to an extreme low.

Once he was alone, he tried to continue with his work. He had to prove himself to be more than anyone thought he was. He had to be better. He couldn’t stop his work because, what, he was just having a little breakdown?

Holy shit.

The world was too much; too loud, too fast, too bright and why is his shirt still touching his chest?

Alex tried to bury his head in his arms, use the pressure to ground himself, but he couldn’t. He wanted to scream until he couldn’t anymore. Without thinking, he forced himself to his feet and stumbled into the hallway of the nearest building.

He tried to make his strides seem as normal as possible, but it proved a difficult task.

He knocked at Washington’s door, opened it without a response, and said-

“I’m going home.”

He shut the door and walked away, eyes focused on the ground and trying his hardest to just get outside.

He went to his dorm.

He collapsed.

  
ⒶⒶⒶ

  
When Thomas Jefferson is alone, he spends quite a lot of time thinking about the end of the world.

It’s not a suicide thing, he swears.

He’s just...fascinated.

Like the Andromeda Galaxy, the damned thing. The way it is rushing at us, the way it is taking its sweet time. The way that we will collide, explode.

Jefferson watches hours and hours of videos. Some from accomplished theoretical physicists, some from half-mad college students who look homeless, on their fourth coffee and shaking as they try to explain how the world is ending tomorrow.

He takes them in all the same.

He takes notes.

The Big Rip. The idea of black energy as the driving force behind the expansion of the Universe. If the Big Rip were to happen, it would happen in 22 billion years, sometime long after the sun had already exploded in on itself and become a red giant, effectively destroying Earth in the progress.

The gist of it? Black Energy forces the universe to expand until it can’t anymore. Atoms can no longer hold onto each other and begin to tear. The universe rips apart.

The only comfort for any of us? We’ll be long dead by the time our atoms decide they don’t like each other anymore and molecularly turn us inside out before exploding.

The scary part for us? We’ll be dead.

Thomas Jefferson sighed, ruminating on the possibilities of the entire universe kicking the big, astral bucket.

He is thinking about the Big Crunch (every conceivable end of the universe is so “big”) when his phone begins to ring.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON.

Jefferson rolls his eyes, turning his phone face down and doodling dying stars on his notes about the universe.

  
ⒶⒶⒶ

  
Alexander Hamilton wakes up from a much-needed nap, no longer in the throes of sensory overload.

When he is alone, he studies literature. Classic, modern, young adult, kid, you name it, he has read it and written entire essays on its contents.

Now, he is leaning against his counter, brewing tea with one hand and highlighting an Annie Dillard essay with the other.

It takes a few minutes for the quiet to get to him.

Alexander has noise-canceling headphones. It’s only proper for someone with a sensory processing disorder. When you flip the “Active” switch on them, the world doesn’t necessarily become quiet. It becomes...static. The white noise that you become accustomed to, like the fan above your head or the hum of electricity in your walls, is suddenly silent.

It gives way to cotton. Static. Emptiness. Alex can’t keep the active switch on for too long-- it begins to hurt his head. So he settles for the white noise and muffled sound. And this works well enough for a while.

He sips his tea, turns a page, and adds sticky notes to the first paragraph he sees.

But noise-canceling headphones don’t work for other senses. Annie Dillard’s words hurt his eyes, and his arms and hands and stomach. There are too many of them, all shoved together on one page and it’s unbearable.

He sinks to his knees.

Alexander tries, he really does try, to contain the emotions he is feeling in a little can and shove it back inside of him. But it’s too late.

He can’t think of any other way. It has to stop. He rises shakily to his feet, and he knows he’s supposed to text his friends when it gets this bad-- being actively suicidal, your friends always have their phone volume turned up for you-- but he can’t bring himself to bother them.

As a last-ditch effort, he tries to dial Thomas Jefferson’s number.

It goes to voicemail.

Alexander puts down the phone, trying to steady his hands. He reaches blindly for anything sharp he can get his hands on. He comes back with a box cutter. He holds it to the pale skin on his wrist.

It becomes just another star in a galaxy of red and pink.

  
ⒶⒶⒶ

  
“Are we going to work on that project together?”

Despite it being uncomfortably hot in the classroom, Alexander is wearing a hoodie. He’s obviously too warm, sweating and shifting in his seat. His eyes are bloodshot as if he’d been crying for hours before class. His face is pale and dark purple lines his under eyes. He does not look well.

“Yeah,” he answered shortly.

Thomas rolled his eyes, sitting next to Alex and pulling out the notes he had already taken on the topic.

Alexander hadn’t taken any. He pulls Thomas’s notes away from him, reading over the main ideas highlighted in yellow.

“The famous Hamilton, unprepared?” Thomas joked. “Call the presses.”

Hamilton doesn’t respond to this.

“It looks good so far, I guess,” he sighs. “I’ll take notes on it later.”

“Don’t you want to discuss it?” Jefferson asked, anger creeping into his voice.

“What’s the prompt again?

“Some question about the positive role of bias in the pursuit of knowledge.”

“Gross.”

Thomas chuckled as Alexander slid down in his seat, closing his eyes and tilting his face up as he thought about it.

“And you mentioned healthy foods, though that’s not necessarily a pursuit of knowledge. A good starting point, though. You- what did you say? Something about neuroscience? How it does not demand to be studied, it’s only bias that allows humans to know what they do about it. So what is bias? What does it mean for something to be positive or negative? Wasn’t it Kant who said nothing is either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so?”

“That was Shakespeare.”

“Same thing.”

“Definitively not.”

“Big word.”

There was silence between them for a second. As much as Thomas loved their debates, this was also good; a quiet contained conversation about philosophy, or human rights, or the meaning of life.

Alex scratched absentmindedly at the inside of his wrist.

“Hey, man, take off your jacket. It’s miserable watching you suffer like that.”

Alex opened one eye, looking over at Jefferson for a second.

“No.”

Thomas rolled his eyes.

“Why do you have it on in the first place?”

Alex’s shoulders tensed up at the question, and alarms immediately went off in Thomas’s head. What was he hiding? Was he- was Alexander doing heroin? Oh God help him, Alexander Hamilton was doing heroin.

Thomas grabbed Alexander’s arm, suddenly yanking him out of his seat. He was going to get the lecture of his life on drugs and alcohol usage. Did he really think he could get into medical school with a heroin needle hanging out of his arm?

“Yo, what’s your problem?” Alexander said. His voice didn’t give away much worry.

Once Thomas got them to a place hidden from others’ view, he grabbed Alexander’s sleeve.

“I cannot believe in all my years of knowing you,” Thomas hissed. “You do this bullshit to yourself and you-”

Thomas yanked up his sleeve.

All the oxygen left his body.

His wrist was littered with miles and miles of jagged, angry red lines. A pink blister-like scar ran from the base of his elbow to his hand. Holy shit.

Alexander tried to yank his wrist away, but Jefferson kept a firm hold on it.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” he snapped. “Can’t just go around pulling up random men’s sleeves.”

“You cut yourself.”

It was a statement rather than a question. Alexander just nodded. How could he explain to someone like Thomas that he had too many emotions all the time and the only way to get them to stop hurting was to hurt himself like this?

Suddenly, the way Thomas was looking at Alex’s wrists, eyes all full of worry and shock, got to Alexander. He started to squirm, and his emotions, once again, were too much.

He wanted to apologize over and over and over. He wanted to wake up from the nightmare that was Thomas Jefferson standing in front of him, tracing his thumb over the scars from his suicide attempt.

“I’m sorry,” Jefferson finally whispered. But it was too late. Alexander’s breathing had begun to pick up, his heart beating out of his chest.

“Hey, shit, I’m sorry,” Jefferson said again, shaking himself out of his shocked state. “Hamiton? What’s going on?”

Then, he realized. Panic attack. He had forced Hamilton to have a panic attack.

“Okay, I- I’m sorry. I’ve got this. I’ll help you, okay? Just- breathe.” Thomas rolled down Alexander’s sleeve and grabbed his hand, placing it against his own chest.

“Breathe with me.”

“God, shut up, please,” Alexander murmured. “Let go of me.” Thomas immediately let go of his wrists and hands.

“Do you need...do you need to go somewhere? Here, let’s go back to my dorm.”

When Alex doesn’t respond, Thomas grabs his sleeve and leads him back to his dorm. On the way, neither of them spoke. A million thoughts were shooting through Thomas’s head. Sure, Alexander had never seemed like the most mentally stable person in the world, but this was way out of his league.

They arrived at Thomas’s dorm, and he shut and locked them inside. He sat Hamilton down on the bed, and he immediately covered his ears with his hands.

“Hey, Alex…”

Alex didn’t respond.

Thomas sighed, tugging the weighted blanket from the floor. He leaned down, slowly removing Alexander’s hands from his ears and placing the blanket on his shoulders. Alexander slumped, all the stress seemingly leaving his body.

“Thank you,” Alex breathed. “Is this-- what is this?”

“It’s a weighted blanket, dumbass.”

“Oh.”

“So are you going to tell me what the hell your wrists are about?”

  
ⒶⒶⒶ

  
Alexander is excellent at describing his emotions. It’s a survival skill for him. If he can’t pick out each emotion he’s feeling, where in his body he’s feeling it, and why, it could lead to his death. Being mentally ill is just like that.

So, he begins.

When he was four, he attempted suicide. He tried to drown himself in a lake. He wanted to be dead so badly, even though he barely knew what it meant. His mom pulled him out.

He laid next to his mom, crying out of hatred for her because how dare she bring him into this world if it’s so bad? No one sees the many bruises or cuts he’s wracking up across his body. He goes through life in a constant state of every emotion being too much. Writing is the only thing that eases the pain.

He’s twelve when he attempts suicide again. He swallows a bottle of pills, wakes up convulsing and foaming at the mouth in his own bathtub.

He can’t seem to die.

He takes up a razor instead of a pen, suddenly too depressed to write anything but his life story in red on his wrists, his thighs, his stomach. One time, his neck. His collarbones, forearms, chest. Anywhere he can reach.

When he gets to college, he finally seeks help.

The therapist tells him that there’s nothing she can do. He is too far gone. He is turned down.

Now he is here, using razors to drag the emotions out of his body.

That night, in particular, it was more sensory than anything; the words and noises and his stupid shirt became too much for him. He couldn’t identify any emotions because he was feeling all of them, all over his body. He couldn’t take it anymore.

ⒶⒶⒶ

  
“What are you feeling right now?” Thomas asks. His voice is a whisper. He is tracing the many cuts on Alexander’s wrist with his thumb.

Alexander closes his eyes, his forehead wrinkling as he tries to focus.

“Um...relief. Relief, I feel it here-” he points to his chest “-and here.” He gestures to his shoulders. “I’m feeling relief because someone else knows what I’m feeling and I feel like...a burden has been lifted. I’m also feeling tired. Here.” He points to his stomach. “And happy.” He points to his neck.

If Thomas is curious as to why Alexander is pointing out where he feels his emotions, he doesn’t show it. He just nods along.

“Suicidal.”

Thomas’s blood runs cold.

“I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.”

“Where do you feel suicidal?”

“Everywhere in my body.”

Thomas released his grip on Alexander’s arm. He brushed Alex’s hair out his eyes, surprised to find tears sitting on his lashes. Thomas placed a gentle hand under Alex’s chin, guiding his face until their eyes met.

“Why do you feel suicidal, Alexander?” he asked softly.

“I always feel suicidal. It’s just my default. I don’t think there’s any purpose in anything ever. You know?”

“How can you be so passionate and yet so suicidal at the same time?”

“It’s a gift.”

Thomas bit his lip in nervousness, rubbing Alex’s cheekbone with his thumb absentmindedly. Alex leaned into the touch, closing his eyes and sighing.

“Do you...do you think you’re going to kill yourself right now? Do you feel safe alone?”

Alex shook his head. Thomas nodded, thoughtful.

“Okay. Okay, I understand. Stay here for the night?”

Alex’s eyes opened suddenly, wide at the offer.

“Really?” he whispered. He looked like a kid who had just been told of Santa.

“Really.”

Alexander leaned forward, wrapping his arms around Thomas’s waist. Thomas jumped, wary of the newfound affection. But, he rationalized, they were no longer enemies. Not after what had just happened. He wrapped his arms around Alexander, allowing Alex’s head to stay on his chest.

God, what was he going to do with this kid?

ⒶⒶⒶ

Alexander fell asleep in Thomas's arms that night. They were watching a movie together; it was Mulan, one that Alexander grew up with and he had seen a million times. He could quote it word for word, knew all the choreography, and could sing all of the songs in Norwegian. Alexander does not speak Norwegian. 

He woke up to an alarm going off. The entire right side of his body was cold from where Jefferson had left him, scrambling to turn the alarm off before it woke him. 

Thomas turned to look at him, phone in hand. 

"I didn't mean to wake you," he said, an apology hiding just behind his words. 

Alexander shrugged. It was a Saturday, after all, and he hated wasting the weekends when he could be doing work. 

He stood, stretching. "Thank you for letting me stay the night." He pulled his phone from his pocket, answering all of his texts. That's another thing about being suicidal: you tend to get a lot of texts, and all of them have to be answered or the police show up at your dorm with paramedics and firemen in tow. Hamilton had learned that lesson a while back when he had forgotten to answer Lafayette's increasingly worried texts. 

"Hey, Alexander?" 

Thomas moved closer, touching Alex's arm lightly. Alex looked up at him, questioning. 

"For what it's worth, I'm glad you're alive." 

His voice was a dull murmur. He leaned in, pressing a soft kiss to Alexander's forehead. The affection sent happiness spiraling from Alexander's throat into his chest and out through his arms. He shrugged his shoulders to get rid of the emotion before it got out of hand. He reached up, standing on his toes, and pressed a soft kiss to Thomas's lips. 

Thomas returned the favor. 

For the first time in Alexander's life, his emotions were quiet. 

It was quiet. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! My name is Jesse! Thank you for reading, I really hope you enjoyed. Please leave a comment if you'd like :) I hope you're having a wonderful day. I love you. Stay alive. Make good choices.
> 
> -j


End file.
